The growth and structural change of the Russian economy during the late tsarist era must be viewed in appropriate historical perspective. Such perspective is provided by comparing the Russian data on economic growth and expenditure and output shares with those of other countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Answers to some of the questions posed in the previous chapter should emerge from such international comparisons. The first question focused on the growth of the Russian economy. Was it slow, average, or rapid relative to the growth rates experienced by other countries over the same period? The second question was whether the Russian industrialization experience was different in some significant way (an “Asian” model) from the general Western pattern of economic development?

To make comparisons of this sort, a large mass of historical data must be available, calculated according to the same procedures as those used to assemble the Russian series. Several rich compilations of national historical series have been prepared and analyzed by Simon Kuznets, Angus Maddison, Paul Bairoch, and B. R. Mitchell, and major studies of national income have been undertaken by Simon Kuznets and Robert Gallman (United States), Walther Hoffmann (Germany), Jan Marczewski and associates (France), Charles Feinstein, P. M. Dean, and W. A. Cole (Great Britain), O. J. Firestone (Canada), and Kazushi Ohkawa and Henry Rosovsky (Japan).

My own examination of these studies suggests a similarity of methodology.